The audio signal is going to Soundflower instead of to the speakers.

And sometimes, my ramblings bring me as far as understanding English meaning of some specific kikuyu translation texts.

Sure I could save the source media file, if I had unlimited disk space.

But what I usually do is keep a link to the original source and text synopsis of the snippet.

That both saves on storage and makes future searches for that particular item simpler.

If youre like me, you really want the original text more than a synopsis.

It take s a bit of extra effort, but I have a nice solution that uses only a Mac and open source software.

Read below for instructions on converting an MP3 audio file to a text document.

The Basics of Configuring Your Mac to Transcribe.MP3 Audio Heres what you need: The original media (.mp3 file, for example) Soundflower.

Soundflower is an application that creates a virtual audio channel and directs audio input and output to physical or virtual devices.

Os X Mp3 Player Free Application For

Audacity. Audacity is a free application for recording and editing sounds.

TextEdit.app. TextEdit is the default text editorword processor that is included in Mac OS X.

Follow the instructions on the developer websites to get all of the software installed and working on your system.

Once you have the software installed, the next step is to configure your Mac to use Soundflower for dictation.

Open System Preferences and click on Dictation Speech Select the Dictation tab Select Soundflower (2ch) as the dictation input source Click Dictation to On Tick the Use Enhanced Dictation box Your Mac is ready for dictation.

When dictation is turned on in TextEdit (or a another word processing app), your Mac will transcribe sound from the Soundflower input source.

Getting Your Audio and Text Files Ready Next, you need to queue up the audio file in Audacity and direct output to Soundflower.

For those who are new to Audacity, this will be the trickiest step.

Os X Mp3 Player How To Select The

But relax, you dont need to learn much about Audacity beyond deciding what section of sound to play and how to select the audio output from the default speakers to Soundflower.

Launch Audacity Import your audio file into audacity (File Import, or simply drag the file into the center of the Audacity screen.) Click the play button to give it a listen, then click stop once your confident you have the right sound cliptranscription area.

Under playback, choose Soundflower (2ch) to switch the output from the onboard speakers to Soundflower.

Click OK With Audacity and your sound file queued up, its time to turn your attention to TextEdit.

Launch TextEdit Create a New Document You may want to add some meta data to the document, such as the podcast name, episode, publish date and URL, to go along with the key transcript.

Position the cursor in the file where you want the transcript to appear.

And Action Its time to start audio playback and dictation transcription.

Press Play. The scrubber and meters will start moving, though you wont hear any sound.